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Though the sun was not very high, it was sufficiently warm when we started, and we had good reason for anticipating a broiling ride. At this point there is not an atom of shade, not the semblance of a tree between the river and the stony desert. All the palm-groves cluster round the town of Edfou and the villages north and south.
If I were called upon to describe in a word the principal and primary characteristic of Egyptian architecture, I should at once say Imagination, as Grace is the characteristic of the architecture of the Greeks. Thus, when the Ptolemies assumed the sceptre of the Pharaohs, they blended the delicate taste of Ionia t with the rich invention of the Nile, and produced Philoe, Dendera, and Edfou.
The gentle and monotonous exercise, now accompanied by monotonous though ungentle music, seemed to assist the movement of his thought. When he left the garrulous lady patient, he might have gone to the post-office and telegraphed to the Loulia. It was possible to telegraph to Edfou.
It was a detective who now walked alone in the temple of Edfou, who penetrated presently once more to the sombre sanctuary, and who stayed there for a long time, standing before the granite shrine of the God, listening mentally in the absolute silence to the sound of an ugly voice. When the heat of noon approached, Isaacson went back to the Fatma.
It was late in the afternoon of next day when we reached the landing-place; but we immediately set out to see the ruin, if ruin it can be called, for it is almost in perfect preservation. After traversing a broad extent of ground covered with rank grass and prickly plants, we came to the customary palm-grove, and then entered what romancers would probably call the 'good city' of Edfou.
And the lines of bending and calling brown men led the eyes towards the south. On a morning at ten o'clock the Fatma arrived opposite to Edfou, and Hassan came to tell his master. The Loulia had not been sighted. Now and then on the gleaming river dahabeeyahs had passed, floating almost broadside and carried quickly by the tide.
In all countries these hours are beautiful; but in Egypt let those who doubt come and witness all that we beheld, and which is indescribable, on the evening that we left the neighbourhood of Silsilis on our way to Edfou on that calm, placid river, over which brooded a silence interrupted only by the alternate songs of the crews of the two boats as they leisurely pulled with the current.
And yet could she, dared she, leave Nigel alone with Meyer Isaacson? She paced again on the sand, passing and repassing in front of the darkness of the bushes. When Isaacson had stood before her in the temple of Edfou, she had had a moment of absolute terror such a moment as can only come once in a life. A period of fear and of struggle, of agony even, had followed.
At Edfou they caught up with us, and passed so close to our boat that the gentlemen talked to them and asked what their regiments were. They said the Twenty-first Lancers and the Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders. Then their boat was gone.
He told me that he met you by chance in the temple of Edfou, that you seemed terrified at seeing him, that it was not you who asked him to come to the Loulia to see me, but that, on the contrary, he asked to come and you refused to let him. He said you even sent him a letter telling him not to come. He gave me that letter. Here it is. I have not read it."
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